What’s in a Brand Identity Style Guide and Why Should Businesses Have It?

Before aiming for brand awareness, businesses should first create a brand identity that suits the nature of the business, is good looking, and that will create a lasting impression. Your brand identity should also be consistent across any communication medium, such as business cards, folders, letterheads, emails, and other marketing collateral – print and digital.

How can businesses keep the brand identity’s consistency? Businesses, as well as their creative services agency, should have a brand identity style guide. A brand identity style guide helps in making sure that the brand identity is consistent everywhere it is applied, regardless of the designer.

A style guide contains all the necessary information to create assets for your business, including the website, ads, creative marketing, and reports, compiled into one document. It may sound easy, but you’ll be surprised to know that not all businesses have their brand identity style guide. This is because creating one takes effort and time, and some businesses would prefer to prioritize other things such as getting straight to executing brand awareness efforts.

Design studio JUST Creative tells us why building a brand identity style guide is worth the time and energy, and to make it easy for designers, creative services agencies, and businesses, they also have provided the ultimate guidewhen it comes to brand identity style guide. Specializing in logo design and brand identity, JUST Creative enumerates all the important elements that should be included in a brand identity style guide.

ONE DOCUMENT ACCESSIBLE TO EVERYONE

When your business has a brand identity style guide, you don’t have to always explain to a designer the exact color, font, and design specs of the logo and branding, especially if there are multiple designers working on them. Think of your brand identity style guide as the encyclopedia, the go-to document that should always be updated and relied on by everyone in your team.

MAIN STYLE GUIDE ESSENTIALS

The elements (both design and copy) with branding requirements that should be clearly and specifically identified in your brand identity style guide include:

Logo

Fonts

Color Palette

Imagery

Copywriting

Photography Style

Illustration Style

Web-specific Elements

Brand History, Vision, and Description

SAMPLES AND ASSETS

To make it even easier for the designer, don’t forget to include a sample for each element to serve as visual reference. Along with the style guide, all assets, such as templates and fonts, should be kept together. Here at MicroCreatives, we also follow a branding and identity design style guide for our own branding, and keep all the assets in a shared folder where our designers, copywriters, animators, and web developers can easily access them when needed.

If you think you barely have time to think about all these things and just want to focus on growing your business, or just starting to develop a brand identity, don’t hesitate to ask us about our creative services and how we can help you create the best brand identity for your business that looks good and perfectly represents what you offer, and maintain consistency across all displays.